Marketplace of Ideas Blog

While at my son’s Cub Scout camp earlier this week, I read this piece from author Michael Chabon that says a lot about parenting and our culture today vs. the culture in which we grew up:

This is the kind of door-to-door, all-encompassing escort service that we adults have contrived to provide for our children. We schedule their encounters for them, driving them to and from one another's houses so they never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between. If they are lucky, we send them out to play in the backyard, where they can be safely fenced in and even, in extreme cases, monitored with security cameras. When my family and I moved onto our street in Berkeley, the family next door included a nine-year-old girl; in the house two doors down the other way, there was a nine-year-old boy, her exact contemporary and, like her, a lifelong resident of the street. They had never met.

The sandlots and creek beds, the alleys and woodlands have been abandoned in favor of a system of reservations — Chuck E. Cheese, the Jungle, the Discovery Zone: jolly internment centers mapped and planned by adults with no blank spots aside from doors marked staff only. When children roller-skate or ride their bikes, they go forth armored as for battle, and their parents typically stand nearby.

There are reasons for all of this. The helmeting and monitoring, the corralling of children into certified zones of safety, is in part the product of the Consumer Reports mentality, the generally increased consciousness, in America, of safety and danger. To this one might add the growing demands of insurance actuarials and the national pastime of torts. But the primary reason for this curtailing of adventure, this closing off of Wilderness, is the increased anxiety we all feel over the abduction of children by strangers; we fear the wolves in the Wilderness. This is not a rational fear; in 1999, for example, according to the Justice Department, the number of abductions by strangers in the United States was 115. Such crimes have always occurred at about the same rate; being a child is exactly no more and no less dangerous than it ever was. What has changed is that the horror is so much better known. At times it seems as if parents are being deliberately encouraged to fear for their children's lives, though only a cynic would suggest there was money to be made in doing so.

Our children are having a different childhood from my childhood and my wife’s childhood. I grew up on the white-collar middle-class east side of Madison, and what I remember most about being the age of my children was being able to do pretty much whatever I wanted, including nothing in particular. My wife grew up on her parents’ farm, and of course farms are wonderful places for adventures in a child’s mind, with acres of fields, paths and barns and other farm buildings.

In contrast, our children so far have had a summer of summer school, baseball, church camp and Cub Scout camp, with trips to the grandparents in late July and August. Our family isn’t taking a vacation this year in large part due to our inability to schedule one, although the thought of being in the same car for days on end with children who can’t share the same back seat isn’t particularly attractive either.

Chabon’s point about parental safety fixation may be less of a point in Northeast Wisconsin, a generally low-crime area. Child abductions, as infrequent as they are, usually are not committed by strangers, but by people the child knows, such as non-custodial parents. But larger societal attitudes, such as concerns about safety, filter down into places where the attitudes need not necessarily apply:

What is the impact of the closing down of the Wilderness on the development of children’s imaginations? This is what I worry about the most. I grew up with a freedom, a liberty that now seems breathtaking and almost impossible. Recently, my younger daughter, after the usual struggle and exhilaration, learned to ride her bicycle. Her joy at her achievement was rapidly followed by a creeping sense of puzzlement and disappointment as it became clear to both of us that there was nowhere for her to ride it — nowhere that I was willing to let her go. Should I send my children out to play?

There is a small grocery store around the corner, not over two hundred yards from our front door. Can I let her ride there alone to experience the singular pleasure of buying herself an ice cream on a hot summer day and eating it on the sidewalk, alone with her thoughts? Soon after she learned to ride, we went out together after dinner, she on her bike, with me following along at a safe distance behind. What struck me at once on that lovely summer evening, as we wandered the streets of our lovely residential neighborhood at that after-dinner hour that had once represented the peak moment, the magic hour of my own childhood, was that we didn't encounter a single other child.

It does make one wonder what kind of society we’ve created for our children, independent of, say, crushing governmental debt or the diminution of the two-parent family. Perhaps one reason TV has become the great entertainer is because we’ve worked to eliminate other forms of entertainment — including making our kids entertain themselves — due to our fixation with risk. Purchase a car within the past decade, and the automakers practically accuse you of child abuse if you dare to put your child in the front seat of your airbag-equipped car. Everyone can insert your own tragic story within your own memory of a horrible accident while kids were at play (an acquaintance of my wife’s died when the sled she was in hit a tree in a park). The awful truth is that sympathy and avoidance of danger does not undo past tragedy.

What kind of person does someone who has been sheltered from bad things, by their parents for understandable reasons, grow up to become? Society has been doing a great job at squashing risk, but with, as usual, unintended consequences. Chabon is concerned that “If children are not permitted — not taught — to be adventurers and explorers as children, what will become of the world of adventure, of stories, of literature itself?” Well before that point, though, can children who “never get a chance to discover the unexplored lands between” grow up to properly assess risk, make good decisions, and learn to harness fear and overcome failure? (That happens to be the recipe to going into business without losing your mind, of course.)

Despite my love of various forms of entertainment produced decades ago, I don't automatically prefer the past to the present. Even if it were possible, I am not interested in going back to a pre-antibiotics, pre-air conditioning, pre-digital era.

But my parents have said that they wouldn’t want to raise children today; they feel parenting is more difficult today than when they were parents of single-digit-age children. I’m beginning to see their point.